Who has actual personal experience with worm towers?

I love the idea of putting food scraps right in the garden beds rather than tending a thermophilic compost pile. But I can't help but wonder about the claim that food scraps in a worm tower will result in worm castings being automagically spread throughout the garden bed. Obviously you can - and probably should - have more than one tower in a bed. But my experience with worm bins leads me to wonder why you wouldn't wind up with a concentrated pile of castings at the bottom of the tower rather than redistribution to the rest of the bed. IME the worms hang out where the food is rather than travelling to areas of lesser food concentration.

I don't use a tower; what I do is put down a little pile of scraps and place some biggish rocks over them. The scraps get eaten by a combination of native worms, pill bugs, sow bugs, and sometimes little native roaches. When I'm raising baby chicks I do this to attract a large number of critters which I can scoop up and feed to the chicks.

I hope this isn't too off-topic!

Idle dreamer

Tobias Ber

Posts: 495

Location: Northern Germany (Zone 8a)

17

posted 2 years ago

heya... i think it depends on what kind of worms are already there... and how much.

when i started with this garden (small allotment, clay soil, not much organic matter in it) there were hardly any worms.
after this season of gardening there are lots of more. i left the potatoes in teh ground for too long, so some rotted. while harvesting them, i collected lots of earthworms for inside worm-bin.
they re not working the same as compost worms are supposed to work.

but i ll try them in dug- in buckets and/or wormtowers.

i started just to dig in the kitchen scraps into the beds. even in winter. while it freezes, it just stays there. but when it gets warm enough for the worms (even some days), they ll find their all-u-can-eat-buffet.

garden worms love this stuff ... but how far will they wander after eating? how far will they scatter their castings? how much matter will they take out of the bucket/tower?